"But how any woman could reach a point so sick, so vindictive, so caustic, so rich, that still unable to strip herself of her lifelong passion for giving she should evolve the perfectly diabolic idea of giving people only the things that they didn't want—only the things, indeed, that she was absolutely positive they didn't want? Such as pianos! Grand pianos! Huge rosewood chunks of intricate mechanism and ornate decoration and Heaven knows what expense—crammed down into the meager crowded office of some poor struggling young doctor who didn't know a note from a gnat! Himself of course being the young doctor!
"Thought it was funny, did she? Thought it would really drive him outdoors for sheer 81 rage into some sort of an enlivening adventure? That was her theory, was it? Well it was funny. And it had driven him out to meet a rather particularly enlivening sort of adventure! Which adventure in the person of a Miss Solvei Kjelland was now due at his office by her own insistent appointment, on Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. But this Miss Solvei Kjelland, it seems, was not the Adventure which Mrs. Tome Gallien had already arranged for him for Saturday afternoon, same hour, same place?"
Into his muddled mind flashed transiently a half-forgotten line of a novel to the effect: "Heaven help the day when the mate you made for yourself and the mate God made for you happen to meet!"
"Well, if it really came to a show-down between his Adventure and Mrs. Tome Gallien's?"
Quite unexpectedly his mouth began suddenly to twitch at one corner. Speaking of "caustic humor" it was barely possible that the Young Doctor had just a tiny bit of caustic humor himself. When a man smiles suddenly on one side of his mouth it is proof at least 82that he sees the joke. Nobody ought to be expected to smile on both sides till he feels the joke as well as sees it.
Certainly the poor Young Doctor was not feeling very much of anything at just this time except a sense of impending doom.
But in this sense of impending doom flickered the one ray of light that at least he knew what his own Adventure was: she was young, lithe, blonde, why as tall as himself, almost! A trifle unconventional, perhaps? Yes, even a good bit amazing! But thoroughly wholesome! And human? Yes that was just it, so deliciously and indisputably human!
But Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure? A woman like Mrs. Tome Gallien wouldn't stop at anything! It might be a pair of llamas from Peru! Or a greasy witchy-gypsy to tell his fortune! Or a homeless little jet-black pickaninny with a banjo and—consumption! Or—or an invitation even to lecture on physiology at a girls school! But whatever it proved to be he might just as well realize now that it would be something that he hated. Mrs. Tome Gallien in her present mood would certainly never seek to lull him with a "glad" 83as long as she saw any possible chance to rouse him with a "mad"!
"Well, he wouldn't get mad yet, anyway!" he promised himself with unwonted whimsicality. "And if it was llamas—which perhaps on the whole would be his preference out of the various possibilities anticipated—they would at least, judging from the woolly pictures in the geographies, be free from any possible danger of barking their shins against the sharper edges of the piano. Whereas a committee of any size come to request a series of lectures on——"
Thus with one form or another of light mental exercise did he try to keep his brain clear and his pulse normal for the approaching Saturday.